Your "Genius" AI Startup Idea Is Probably Worthless
I have a folder on my computer called "Million Dollar Ideas."
It’s full of half-finished projects: a revolutionary social media scheduler, a game-changing analytics tool, an AI-powered content generator that was supposed to make me rich.
They all have one thing in common: they never made a dime.
I was chasing the fantasy. You know the one. The brilliant founder, the sexy tech, the SaaS unicorn that changes the world. It’s a story we tell ourselves to justify spending a year of our lives building something nobody will ever use.
But what if the real path to quitting your day job isn't a brilliant idea, but a boring one? What if the key to freedom is doing the mind-numbing work nobody else wants to do?
I’m not just asking. I’m telling you about a guy named Sclisbon, whose story, buried on Reddit, is the only startup guide you actually need. He tried building the "sexy" AI products. They cratered. Then he offered a simple, manual service and pulled in over $70,000.
This is the playbook they don't teach you in business school.
Act 1: The Glamour Trap (Or, How to Waste a Year of Your Life)
Two years ago, Sclisbon was one of us. Stuck in a 9-to-5, dreaming of building his own thing. The AI gold rush was on, and he jumped in headfirst.
His first shot was an AI tools directory. Looked good on paper. A few similar sites were blowing up. He spent the better part of a year building it, tweeting his progress like a good little indie hacker.
After eight months, he sold it. For less than $2,000.
Let that sink in. Eight months of work for less than a month's rent. Most people would quit right there. But Sclisbon saw it as validation. It wasn't life-changing money, but it was proof. Someone paid him for something he built.
So he doubled down on the AI trend. He launched an AI image generator. Then an AI text detector.
The result? Crickets. Radio silence.
This is the dirty secret of the "build it and they will come" religion. The market doesn't give a damn about your tech stack. It doesn't care if you're using the latest AI model. It only cares about its problems. Sclisbon was building shiny objects for a trend, not tools for a person. He was building solutions looking for a problem.
The startup graveyard is filled with those.
Act 2: Finding Gold in Your Own Annoyance
This is where the story gets good. This is where he stopped trying to be a "visionary" and started solving a problem that was personally pissing him off.
Frustrated that his own products weren't getting any attention, he realized the real bottleneck wasn't the product—it was getting people to see it. One of the few things that worked was submitting his tools to a bunch of online directories.
But he found a new problem: most of those directory lists were complete garbage. Outdated links, scammy paywalls, junk sites. It was a soul-crushing chore to find the few that were actually worth the effort.
So, he did what any of us would do. He made his own list. A simple spreadsheet of directories that actually worked.
He didn't try to sell it. He just shared it on social media to be helpful. And people went nuts for it. Some even sent him "buy me a coffee" donations, unprompted, just for saving them the headache.
That's the signal.
Forget market research. Forget focus groups. When a stranger voluntarily sends you money because you solved an annoying problem for them, you've found something real. He had stumbled, completely by accident, into a real business.
He spent a year building fancy AI tools nobody wanted. He spent a weekend building a simple list people were literally throwing money at.
Act 3: The Monetization Twist That Crushed the SaaS Dream
So what do you do with a popular list?
99% of us would slap a $29 price tag on it and call it a digital product. Scalable, easy, passive income. The dream, right?
Wrong.
Sclisbon did something way smarter. Something less glamorous, less scalable, and a hell of a lot more profitable.
He realized the list wasn't the real solution. The list was a map. The real, painful problem was the work. The hours of tedious, mind-numbing labor required to manually submit your website to 100 different places, each with its own stupid form.
So he put up a simple website and offered to do it for them. A "submit-for-you" service.
The result? Over $70,000 in revenue.
The AI tool he spent 8 months on made him $2,000. This boring, manual service made him 35 times more money.
This is the power of a productized service. It's the bridge between freelancing (trading time for money) and building a product (which usually loses money for a year).
Here’s why it worked:
He sold time, not info. Nobody wants to buy a list. Everyone wants to buy back 20 hours of their life.
Cash from day one. No waiting for traction. No leaky bucket. Just money in the bank.
He got paid to do market research. Every customer told him exactly what they needed.
The tech was a joke. A landing page, a checkout link, and a spreadsheet. He spent his time marketing, not fixing bugs.
He didn't need investors. He didn't need a team. He just found a horrible, repetitive task and offered to take the pain away. It’s the least sexy business idea in the world, and it was his ticket out of his 9-to-5.
Act 4: The Part Where You Get Punched in the Mouth
Of course, the story doesn't end there. The moment you find something that works, the universe sends copycats, competitors, and distractions.
His public success got him a job offer at an AI startup. For a while, he was living the dream: between his job and his service, he was making $12,000 to $15,000 a month. He'd made it.
Then he got laid off.
For most, that’s a catastrophe. A return to zero. But here’s the lesson: a layoff is only a disaster if you have nothing to fall back on. Sclisbon had his service. His skills. His reputation.
Getting laid off from a job you got because of your side project isn't a failure. It's a graduation. He was now, officially, a full-time indie hacker, stronger and smarter than before.
The 3-Step Plan to Find Your Own '$70k Boring Idea'
Sclisbon’s story isn’t a neat little blueprint. It’s a messy, real-world scavenger hunt. It’s proof that you don't need a world-changing idea to change your own world.
Here's your homework. Stop sketching out your SaaS unicorn and do this instead:
Find Your Annoyance. What's a stupid, repetitive task you hate doing? What do you complain about constantly? What task makes you think, "I would pay someone to just handle this"? Write it down. That's your goldmine.
Create the "Dumb" Solution. What's the absolute simplest, most manual way to solve that problem? A checklist? A spreadsheet? A 30-minute call? Build the V-0.1 version. No code.
Offer the Service First. Find 10 people with the same problem. Don't sell them a product. Offer to solve their problem for them. Personally. Manually. If they pay you, you’ve validated both the problem and the solution.
The Truth About Building Something That Actually Works
The best business ideas aren't the ones that impress other founders at meetups. They're the ones that solve a real, nagging problem so well that people are happy to pay you to make it go away.
Your first profitable idea will probably be something you think is beneath you.
The real question isn't "What's the next big tech trend?"
It's "What boring, repetitive crap are people desperate to pay someone else to do?"
Start there. Your bank account will thank you.